Vertigo
by Coin
Summary: The thankless brat.
1. How do you measure?

**I DON'T OWN ANYTHING CANON**

* * *

Some people would like to look at love as a practical thing. You fall in love, you get married, and you have kids. The cycle continues and if it didn't, we wouldn't have any new generations.  
  
But sometimes love loses its practicality and everyone wonders 'Why is that still going on?' What do we do then? Do we repress it all because it isn't 'right' or 'proper'?  
  
Or do you drudge on because love is all we, as human beings, want to do? We were born from love, born to love.  
  
Is it ok to die for love? The kind of love that no one will understand?

* * *

_People always look down at us workin' kids. 'Poor newsies, hardly a place for them to rest der heads at night'. I wish people would stop feeling sorry for us and just buy a goddamned pape. It'd sure be better than their pity._  
**Mush Meyers**  
  
Mush Meyers doesn't know much about his parents. His mother was a poor maid who had been working her entire life; his father was a womanizing young man who caused mischief wherever he went.  
  
They met at a party that Mush's father had attended…uninvited and that Mush's mother was working at. Mush's mother tried to serve him one of those dainty foods they serve on doilies but Mush's father decided to wink at her and then pinch her butt when she walked away instead.  
  
She thought he was hilarious.  
  
He thought she'd pass the time until morning.  
  
They snuck off into a closet, or a bedroom, or an alleyway.  
  
And that's where Mush came from. Now this would have been fine if Mr. Meyers had married the mother of his child or helped her to raise him.  
  
But…Mush's mother was black. And Mush's father was not. Suddenly, she wasn't worth his time because of that very fact, and he left her to fend for herself.  
  
They were so poor that at seven, Mush began to work just as his mother had to. Hawking headlines for a dime a day and picking up all sorts of slang.  
  
Mush's mother was guilt ridden. She promised herself long ago that she would not bring a child into this world until she was ready. But she had no other choice.  
  
When Mush was ten, his mother died from influenza, or pneumonia…he couldn't even remember anymore. All he knew was that she was gone.  
  
And the family tradition of fending for yourself continued.

* * *

_Someone once told me I say what everyone's thinking…but is too afraid to say. I never asked for that talent. But here I am, with my big mouth._

**Coin Carrigy**  
  
Coin Carrigy was born in what could only be described by someone with any amount of money as a shack. Four walls and a roof and it held the entire Carrigy clan. It was cold, inside and out, but everyone seemed content.  
  
But adults can never be satisfied. Coin's parents said all the clichés: Ireland was wet, Ireland was poor, they were starving, and the most important one- America was better.  
  
So they packed all of their belongings (which were a bible, some pots, a kettle, and some blankets) and Mr. Carrigy had his last pint at the pub. There were tears and prayers and it played out like all the stories. The family leaves their beautiful countryside for the hustle and bustle of America.  
  
Everyone did it. It seemed like no one was staying on the oppressed island. But for the Carrigys it seemed as though they were all alone in their journey. When you do something so…life altering…you think it's only happening to you.  
  
Because who else would want to go through that much change?  
  
They resided in Manhattan. Mr. Carrigy sought out a job. Mass every Sunday, iron your skirts for school. Say the rosary. Say it again. One more Hail Mary. Read good books, sing pretty songs. Jump rope and hop-scotch. Be a good little girl and we'll give you sweets.  
  
To be a good little girl again.  
  
At age eighteen, it was all Coin wanted.

* * *

Coin is having another multi-chaptered story even though she hasn't updated her others in ages?  
  
Of course not. That was just a figment of your imagination.  
  
Screw Mary Sue comments. Coin's name is not Mary Sue. It's Anna Coin Carrigy.  
  
Feedback is appreciated **and **helpful. 


	2. 525,600 moments

**DON'T OWN ANYTHING CANON. DO OWN EVERYTHING ELSE**

* * *

A city is where one moment holds a host of possibilities.  
  
But it is the most fundamental of those possibilities that we hold on to and care about the most.  
  
Right now someone is dying, someone is being born, and two people are falling in love in New York City. And 12:14 PM on the third of May 1900 was no different.  
  
In a brick apartment building in Brooklyn a woman of about twenty was giving birth to her first and only child. It wasn't that she didn't want anymore children; it's just that she was going to die.  
  
Her daughter wouldn't be all together bright and end up being a secretary in the twenties with a short skirt and even shorter hair.  
  
And on an old lady's front steps, that little piece of sidewalk she called her own, Mush Meyers would meet Coin Carrigy.  
  
And it would go downhill from there. Or uphill. Depends on how you look at it.  
  
Mush was nonchalantly wandering up and down the street. He was bored, tired, and hungry. But, one more paper sold would give him enough to have lunch. He fixed his old cap trying to stuff his unruly curly hair underneath it and gave up screaming headlines. He took a seat on the old lady's front stoop.  
  
Coin was taking a day off school. She had set off for Saint Mel's School in her uniform for class earlier that morning but halfway there she decided that maths and English weren't in her agenda that day. She arrived in the old brick school and faked being ailed with the plague so Sister Mary Aileen sent her home.  
  
She spent the day hiding behind carts so as not to get caught ditching school. Mush yawned, listened to his stomach growl.  
  
Back in Brooklyn, the midwife said it wasn't looking good.  
  
"She probably won't make it…"  
  
"Oh God. How the hell am I supposed to raise a brat by myself?" the father asked. He had already drowned out his wife's screams of pain in whiskey and now his words were becoming slurred.  
  
Coin wandered down the street. She had decided upon buying a paper but was without a newsboy. 'When you don't want a paper they're screaming in your face. When you do want one they're no where to be found'.  
  
She passed by Mush, and stopped when she realized the pile of papers next to him.  
  
If all of New York had been quiet, Mush and Coin could have probably heard the wails of a mother about to die.  
  
"Gone on strike again?" she asked with a smirk.  
  
"No…want one?" he asked eagerly.  
  
She bought the paper and sat down next to him, opened it up and began to hum to herself as she read the day's news.  
  
"GOD please God…make it stop," the cries were becoming louder, more feverish.  
  
"Shouldn't a girl like you be in school?" he asked, pointing at her uniform.  
  
"Yea…decided not to today. Couldn't stand another day of being told what to do by nuns."  
  
"I wish I could go to school"  
  
The mother was feeling anger in her last breaths. "YOU BASTERD! You did this to me!"  
  
Coin's cheeks got hot. She felt how selfish she was. Mush took off his hat and twitched, embarrassed by what he just said.  
  
A baby cried. Loud, raucous cries that tore apart everyone who heard them. The mother lay lifeless on her own bed. God decided it was time for her to go, and she went.  
  
Coin vowed to never ditch school again.  
  
"But I can see why you wouldn't want to go," Mush said, grinning from ear to ear.  
  
A woman died to bring her child into this world. That child came and did nothing but take up space. But because of her sacrifice, the baby had a chance.  
  
Two teenagers blushed and laughed and felt the dizzying high of falling in love.

* * *

**Shout outs to**: C.M Higgins, Lyra. 


	3. In laughter, in strife

In the margins and inside the covers of dozens of books were Coin's messages to Mush. Some were silly, others pointless, and towards the end…most were gut wrenching. Because of Mush's livelihood he was able to read the young girl's scrawled penmanship inside the musty books. It took him weeks to finish the simplest of books, the same ones Coin read when she was half his age, but he did do surprisingly well. She smiled as he nodded and bit his bottom lip, trying to understand what was going on.

He hated every single story, plot, and character. He thought she read depressing books. She gave him books where everything was horrible and no one ever did right. But he read them for her and for those little scrawled messages tucked away in the musty margins.

The smell made him think of how lovely Coin smelled and how her hair fell perfectly off her shoulders.

It had to be love, according to the boys.

"If ya're reading books then dis girl has got to have magical powers," Race declared, flabbergasted that Mush was reading and that it wasn't headlines.

"Either dat or she's really good looking," Blink laughed. A chorus of boys responded making suggestive comments.

It actually angered Mush.

"She's my friend, so juss SHUT UP about her!" yelled Mush. The whole room fell silent.

"Damn, she must be special," Race called out and the room fell back into an easy murmur again; the whole incident forgotten.

For weeks the boys teased him, and Mush just stepped forward. Nothing could stop them. From…from…

Well, neither of them were exactly sure of what was going on.

Obviously, love was there. Neither of them liked the term or the idea at first. It was there, almost looming over their heads, but they ignored it. They wanted to be friends; they wanted to not hate each other in the end.

Coin's parents fought constantly. She was convinced that marriage and love is what did it to them. Her brother, who was a priest in Ireland until he was murdered by the British Army, was relatively happy before his death. He had always been smiling, sweet, and compassionate. But her parents were always in sour moods, glaring at one another across the dinner table. She considered being a nun but they always hated children and Coin didn't want to put anyone through what she had to go through at St. Mel's. She figured life went like this: you either get married, then hate someone your entire life or you completely remove yourself from that and end up dead or an evil-doer to children.

Basically, everyone was doomed in Coin's assumption.

Any doubts she had on her theory were gone the day she saw a group of nuns on their off time in the school office of St. Mel's. Coin had forgotten her mittens and her mother was desperate to know how she could forget such an important necessity to life.

"THEY ARE YOUR MITTENS COIN. YOUR MITTENS. HOW COULD YOU FORGET THEM?"

"Because without them I'll die of pneumonia, right?" Coin sarcastically remarked.

Before her mother could smack her with the wooden spoon, she left the apartment.

Coin ran the whole way back, through the gates, up the steps, down the corridor and to the cloak room. As she tip toed back to the front door, her hands now warm and her lungs safe from pneumonia, she heard the cackles of a group of middle aged women having a good time. She followed the sound of every horrible teacher's voice to room 116 (where Coin had religion every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday first thing in the morning) and saw the nuns, even Sister Mary Aileen was giggling.

Nuns, the most evil people on the planet, were having a _good time_. Coin then understood. Nuns hated children because they couldn't have any of their own so they didn't know what it was like to be a kid. Or to love children unconditionally. And nuns were happy when they weren't around because that missing link wasn't always on their minds like love was always on people's minds. They weren't bogged down with love and how it makes you despise the person who makes you out of control. Hence, the carefree laughter emanating from room 116.

Coin cried the whole way home. She wasn't sure why but her guess was that knowing that she'd never be able to laugh like that again tore her up inside. She didn't hate Mush, he was perfect in her eyes, but she'd never be carefree again.

She wiped the tears as snow began to fall. And then went home to the borders around the words she cared for so much. She wrote little messages to Mush, because it stopped her from choking on her tears.

"_It's odd to write about love"_ Coin scribbled in the margin of a book where the heroine threw herself off of a building in the last chapter, _"because it always sounds…stupid. But, this isn't stupid. Is it?"_

"No, it isn't" Mush replied out loud.

He was the only one on the fire escape. The city's only reply was yells and horses clomping down the cobblestone.

* * *

Shout outs & love to Buttons, Dimonah Tralon, Lyra, & C.M. Higgins 


	4. In inches, in miles

Coin did not like her family. She thought they were obnoxious, judgmental, and she was convinced her mother and father hated all of them. Especially Coin.

She thought it was because, at the tender age of fourteen, Coin made a decision: She hated most of her life. Coin refused to like school, knitting, jump rope, church, or New York City. However, she never mouthed a word of her distaste to Mush. He told her his dreams of books and classrooms, how much he loved the warm things she knitted him, that he wish he could play and be normal like other children, how he longed to go to mass. But most importantly, New York was his only parent. His only constant. He both loved and loathed the city that raised him but it was all he knew. Mush would never leave it.

Mush kept things from Coin too. It may not have made their relationship pure, but they felt a desperate need to protect each other.

That's why Mush never told Coin about the first day he met her father.

On an abnormally warm and bizarrely misty January day, Mush had left both the scarf and gloves that took Coin hours of frustration to knit him at the lodging house underneath his mattress. There was no need for heavy clothes today. Even at the break of dawn, it was almost warm, and no one could see their breaths turn white in front of their eyes. The magic that is cold weather disappeared for just a day.

Mush's mother was the kind of woman who believed in fate and magic. She was always looking for signs and warnings in normal things around her. If it was misty outside, or the full moon was coming she would stay inside the whole.

Her fear of the powers that be did not get passed down to her son. Mush didn't remember much about her, but that trait was on of the few things that stuck out in his mind. He thought it was silly of her to always run away from bad luck when it was clearly her fate to have it anyway.

So on the misty, warm January day, (which was also the day of a full moon unbeknownst to Mush) he set out to sell his papers very gladly. Mush had taken to selling in Coin's neighborhood, walking her to school, and selling on the way back. He saw her father go off to work every single day and it frightened Mush to see how big and burly her father was. He had a gruff way of walking, with his hands in his pockets always. His head was usually transfixed straight ahead; the hair on top of it jet black and his beard a dark red.

To Mush, he looked like an animal.

He was running late, and hoping he wouldn't have to see Coin's father on this day. But Coin's father was running late too. Coin's mother was pregnant yet again and she had gone into labor early that morning. Mush waited across the street from their towering apartment building filled with Irish immigrants just like them. People were yelling at each other, things came flying out of windows on every story. Mush's head was transfixed on the bedroom window that Coin shared with her other sisters. But on this morning she didn't come when she normally did. Mush waited, his heart aching to see her. His thoughts focused only on the dusty curtains that framed Coin when she came to wave to him before running down the seven flights of stairs in her plaid wool skirt.

He hadn't noticed that Mr. Carrigy was standing right next to him. In fact, he had asked the boy for a paper three times but Mush couldn't hear him.

Finally, Mush turned to see the grumpy man before him. His brow was furrowed in confusion; his hands were still in his pockets.

"What the hell is wrong with ya?" He demanded of Mush.

"Oh, sorry sir. Here's a paper on me," Mush responded politely.

"I've seen you before," Coin's father replied. "In this very neighborhood. There's no lodging houses here. There's no colored people here. Why are you always around?" Mush stood silently, staring at him. Colored people? "…Well?"

"Oh…well sir. Uhm…this is just where I sell. Gotta sell somewhere."

"Suppose. Do you know any of my sons? They're always talkin' about wanting to leave school and to be newsies. Say that they talk you people, that the know all the in's and out's. It's all nonsense if ya ask me. You can just go to the stand and buy a paper if ya wanted to," Coin's father just kept talking and talking, all while reading the paper just like Coin had that first day on the porch.

Mush was completely flabbergasted.

"Why do you do it?"

"I've got nothing else," Mush said bravely. Mr. Carrigy could call him colored, he could look down on him, and he could make fun of what he did with himself everyday. But Mush would never let anyone think that he sold papers from dawn to dusk everyday for the glamour of it. This wasn't a fanciful idea thought up by two private school boys. This was his life.

Mush turned from Mr. Carrigy, fed up with his pointless banter. He heard a thud and his pocket suddenly seemed a lot lighter.

Coin's book.

Mr. Carrigy was one step ahead of Mush. He bent down to pick up the book and stopped for a second.

"My daughter Anna, well we call her Coin, she has this book" he smirked and went to hand it to Mush. But he stopped when he saw the look on the young boy's face and opened the cover.

_"To Mush,"_ it said

_No one kills themselves in this one! Isn't that great?_

_Love, Coin"_

Mr. Carrigy understood it now. It all made sense.

His daughter. A boy. A _news_boy. Mush ran eight blocks without stopping. Without breathing.

They had been found out.

* * *


	5. In truths that she learned

On the cold wood floor in a musty hallway Coin rocked back and forth.

She knew. She read the book. It was all her had left that stupid, godforsaken, carnet colored book lying on the table. It was Sarah. The nosey bitch. Sarah gave it to their mother and her mother read the notes to Mush. It was the book he read over Christmas. He had just given it back to her. Coin remembered setting it down on the table and Sarah must have read it. That nosey, good for nothing bitch.

Coin never hated someone so much as she hated her sister at that very moment. She was completely out of breath lying on a cold floor. In the next room, there was a baker's dozen worth of boys who were convinced that she was crazy and a handful that didn't even notice her existence. She ran over the scene in her head as she dully kicked the wall, Mush watching her. He didn't know what to do; he just watched. Coin thought.

"We gave you a nickname because you hated your real name. Not because we wanted you to become a street rat. I should've seen this coming. You hate EVERYTHING, don't ya Coin? Anna? Godforbid anything not go Anna's way! And now, you're running 'round the streets with some common thief that sells papers for a living! I know it's a newsboy! I can see the print all over the pages. AND THE LITTLE NOTES! You sure do love that piece of shit, don't you? But godforbid you like school or mass. We came here for you. We work for you. Everything I do is for you. This is how you thank me! Hah! Anna you are a thankless little brat!" Coin's mother had screamed to her over the doctor while he was taking her pulse. He had given up, knowing the reading would be inaccurate, and watched as a woman who had just given birth less then twenty four hours ago yelled and swore like a drunken sailor.

He had never seen anything like it before. Ignoring Mrs. Carrigy he went to check on the newborn. A boy. His eyes looked just like Mush's to Coin. She smiled at him and walked out of the room, past the midwife and bassinet, while her mother yelled about her being a trampy and thankless brat.

Coin decided to leave before her father got home. She couldn't handle it. She wasn't thankless, she was. Well, she was in love. Her crazy mother was just going to have to deal with that.

She took her books and her measly amount of money from under her mattress, threw it in one of her mother's bags without her knowledge and calmly walked out of the apartment. She was no longer Anna Coin Carrigy. She was just Coin. Out in the hallway Sarah played hopscotch with chalk they stole from school and Coin spat in her face. They may have been blood related but as far as Coin was concerned, she had no sisters. She had no family.

It was Kloppman who opened the door at, according to his time piece, 5:43 PM. He thought it was one of the boys home early for dinner but it was a girl. A girl who would be pretty if she didn't scrunch up her face like that and if she fixed those curls.

"This place is for boys, I'm sorry. Girls is down the street," he gestured out the door and down the cobblestone. He smiled and tried to close the door but he stopped her.

She said nothing. Walking straight past the old man she smiled, said thank you and stood in the center of the lodging house.

"Alright then," he ushered her in closing the door quickly. "If anyone asks, you're a boy."

She laughed and he walked off into the shadows. She took a seat on the foot of the stairs and after hearing a door close she began to cry to herself.

In the middle of her breakdown, twenty boys came trampling in. She was sure that they had to have broken the door down but there it was, still on the hinges.

"None of us can ever come home without someone's girlfriend sitting on the steps, crying. Goddamn!" Skittery called out agitated.

The boys' nodded in agreement and Coin heard one or two of them murmur "Yea" to themselves. After they all climbed over her, up the stairs she saw Mush. His face was stricken with the thought of the bad news he knew was coming.

"They know," she whispered.

"You can stay here tonight," he said soothingly and took a seat right next to her.

"What are we going to do after that?" they said in unison.

* * *

**A/N--**If it sucks, please forgive me. I've had an awful day. Thank you again for all of the reviews. 


End file.
